Re: Proposal: add a _NET_WM_DESKTOP_FILE

[Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman) <raster rasterman com>]

On Wed, 11 Nov 2015 09:36:48 -0500 Allison Ryan Lortie <desrt desrt ca> said:

> hi Martin,
>
> We were just talking about this on IRC today and I independently
> proposed something very similar.  At that point, someone pointed me to
> this thread.
>
> I support this idea as being generally useful.  For some time, GTK has
> been setting the _GTK_APPLICATION_ID property and gnome-shell has been
> looking for a desktop file with this name.
>
> I'd make two modifications to your proposal.
>
> First, I'd rename the key to "XDG_APPLICATION_ID" to reflect that
> alignment with xdg specs, namely the desktop file spec and the fact that
> the string here identifies the application in all ways.

hmm no - _NET_WM_ ... as this is a netwm spec. if it ever becomes one. like all
others. martin is right here.

> Second, I'd add a requirement that the application owns the D-Bus
> session bus name specified in the property.  According to the desktop
> file specification, the bus name of the application and the desktop file
> name should already be the same string.  This equivalence means that the
> application really has only one identifier by which it is called, which
> is why I think we should just call this the "application ID".

hell no. don't bring dbus into a netwm spec. this is a gnome-ism where "the
world is dbus". no. not every app should be required to add the extra work of
having to ALSO set up a dbus connection (open socket, negotiate etc." before it
can go go creating a window. not to mention yet-more-memory to store dbus
connection state info, memory on dbus server side too... not to mention if the
app currently doesnt use dbus at all - this means having to do all the work of
adding it to it's linking, compile time etc. etc.

big fat no.

> As a minor nit, I guess I also think it's slightly odd that we use UTF-8
> here for something that can only ever be ASCII, but that's a pretty
> minor point.

actually a file path is just a bytestring. it may be utf8 encoded, perhaps
something else, but as long as it has no zero byte and uses a / char between
directories... it's all good. the process and the wm (for this to work) would
share the same filesystem and thus the same view of it most likely... so this
is just an extra detail that adds work of having to figure out encoding and
convert to/from utf8. just leave it alone imho. make it the file path and
leave it at that as paths are well known strings. :)

> What are your thoughts?
>
> Cheers
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The Rasterman (Carsten Haitzler)    raster rasterman com